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Middleware for internet of things: an evaluation in a small-scale IoT environment

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Abstract

The internet of things (IoT) envisages an ultralarge-scale network of things, which will offer services to a large number of applications in numerous domains and environments. A middleware can ease application development by providing the necessary functional components for service registration, discovery and composition. Recently, there have been a large number of proposals for IoT middleware solutions, and a few recent studies have surveyed and qualitatively evaluated these IoT middleware proposals against a variety of functional features. This paper is an extension of these studies with an evaluation of four representative middlewares in a small-scale scenario to provide a more in-depth perspective of the state of the art with reference to the scale and heterogeneity of dynamic IoT environments. The results show a number of issues. Service registration, discovery and composition components still require human intervention. With such a large number of available services, these components need to be automated to enable fast deployment and adaptation of IoT applications. The scalability evaluation of new proposals should follow a holistic approach, as opposed to considering only individual components. Finally, support for user’s non-functional requirements is limited to best-effort QoS.

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Acknowledgements

This work was funded by the Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) under Grant 13/IA/1885.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Distributed Systems Group, School of Computer Science and Statistics, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

    Andrei Palade, Christian Cabrera, Fan Li, Gary White, M. A. Razzaque & Siobhán Clarke

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  1. Andrei Palade
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  2. Christian Cabrera
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Correspondence to Andrei Palade.

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Palade, A., Cabrera, C., Li, F. et al. Middleware for internet of things: an evaluation in a small-scale IoT environment. J Reliable Intell Environ 4, 3–23 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40860-018-0055-4

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